UN To Expand Police Force

SLOBODAN LEKIC
The Associated Press
Philly

UNITED NATIONS - With the world facing new security threats, the U.N. is planning for an unprecedented expansion of its police missions. U.N. officials say a shift in the nature of conflicts requires revamped peacekeeping operations.

Traditionally, the U.N. has facilitated peace between warring states by sending its blue-helmeted soldiers to man buffer zones between their armies. But today, interventions are increasingly focused on settling civil wars.

"In recent years the character of conflicts has changed dramatically from mainly state-to-state wars (to) intrastate conflicts which pit various factions within the boundaries of a single state," U.N. Police Chief Andrew Hughes said.

As a result, there is a greater need than ever for conventional police duties in post-conflict situations.

Nowhere is this highlighted more clearly than in Darfur.

The U.N. is recruiting nearly 7,000 police officers to assist some 20,000 U.N. peacekeeper-soldiers in trying to end the four-year conflict in western Sudan.

Police involvement in peacekeeping dates from the inaugural 1948 mission, when first Secretary-General Trygve Lie urgently dispatched several dozen U.N. security guards from New York to Jerusalem when Jewish extremists assassinated the U.N. peace envoy Folke Bernadotte.

In later interventions, however, the U.N. has come to rely mostly on soldiers to monitor cease-fires or interpose themselves between warring sides, as happened in the Sinai after the 1956 Egypt-Israel war, or later in disputed Kashmir, Cyprus and Lebanon.

The Balkan wars of the 1990s put renewed focus on peacekeeping by police units.

"In such conflicts, once peace is restored the U.N. then has a key role in re-establishing rule of law, which includes police, courts, prisons and the whole justice sector, and to ensure that they rebuild or build up from scratch their police services," Hughes said.

But Hughes emphasized that police and military missions have critical differences.

Soldiers have different rules of engagement that provide for the use of lethal force and are therefore not suited for such duties such as apprehending criminals, escorting children to schools or calming rioting mobs.

"For us the use of force is absolutely the last option," Hughes said. "Our police are trained much more extensively to defuse the situation, and negotiations are by far and away the biggest tool we have."

A new Police Division was set up in October 2000 as part of the U.N. Department of Peacekeeping Operations with a staff of several dozen experienced police officers from contributing countries.

Currently, there are about 70,000 U.N. peacekeeping troops deployed worldwide, with an additional 9,500 police officers, mostly in Africa , such as Liberia, Ivory Coast, Congo, Burundi and Western Sahara , as well as in Haiti, Kosovo and East Timor.

With U.N. missions in Chad and Darfur coming on line in 2008, the ranks of U.N. police are to swell to nearly 17,000 officers from more than 100 countries.

"Our duties included everything a policeman can possibly do, from breaking up domestic disturbances to chasing and arresting armed criminals," said Irhad Campara, a Bosnian policeman who served in the U.N. mission in East Timor.

"In addition, we recruited, vetted and trained from scratch East Timor's new national police force."
Whereas military units are dispatched by governments, police officers are recruited on individual contracts from contributing nations. They continue to collect their home pay but receive an extra daily allowance of $150 and accommodation from the U.N.

Not all operations have gone smoothly, however, and the U.N. police force has suffered several high-profile reverses over the past several years.

In 2004, U.N. police officers failed to stem the violence in Kosovo when thousands of ethnic Albanians rioted in a backlash against the Serb minority, killing 19 people, displacing thousands, and destroying hundreds of Serb homes, churches and monasteries.

And in East Timor, the U.N.-trained police force collapsed last year following an army mutiny, necessitating another mission to rebuild it anew.

To hopefully prevent such calamities, the U.N. is preparing two initiatives to facilitate rapid police deployment to crisis areas and to enable them to function more effectively from the outset.

The first is the introduction of Formed Police Units , 160-strong contingents of officers from a single country , skilled in dealing with a wide spectrum of problems, from riot control to arresting armed criminals.

The initial unit, an all-female company of Indian officers, has recently arrived in Liberia to join the U.N. force there.

The second initiative is to create a standing police detachment of about two dozen officers who can be deployed together with U.N. military units to a trouble spot, thus allowing the police to be present from the start of a U.N. mission.

Previously, the slow and complicated process of recruiting volunteers from participating countries meant police recruits lagged an average of nine months behind the soldiers.

But critics say these measures are insufficient.

William Durch from the Henry L. Stimson Center, a think tank in Washington, proposed creating a ready reserve of about 11,000 police volunteers worldwide who would be paid retainer fees while on standby and who could be quickly mobilized for future U.N. missions.

"The system by which the U.N. recruits its people must be completely revamped to be able to provide security personnel in the critical initial phases of a mission," said Durch, an expert on peacekeeping operations.